Beyond the cypresses, stretching away to the horizon, as misty as a southern sea, lies the vast Honey Island Swamp. Smudges of hummocks dot its savanna-like islands. The north-south interstate, crossing it on a causeway, flies due south straight as two lines drawn with a ruler to converge at a point on the horizon.
From the hummocks arise one or two wisps of smoke. Yonder in the fastness of the swamp dwell the dropouts from land castoffs of and rebels against our society: ferocious black Bantus who use the wilderness both as a refuge and as a guerrilla base from which to mount forays against outlying subdivisions and shopping plazas; all manner of young white derelicts who live drowsy sloth-like lives, sustaining themselves on wild melons and catfish and green turtles and smoking Choctaw cannabis the livelong day. The lonely hummocks, once the haunt of raccoon and alligator, are now rubbed bare as monkey islands at the zoo by all manner of disaffected folk: Bantu guerrillas, dropouts from Tulane and Vanderbilt, M.I.T. and Loyola; draft dodgers, deserters from the Swedish army, psychopaths and pederasts from Memphis and New Orleans whose practices were not even to be tolerated in New Orleans; antipapal Catholics, malcontented Methodists, ESPers, UFOers, Aquarians, ex-Ayn Randers, Choctaw Zionists who have returned to their ancestral hunting grounds, and even a few old graybeard Kerouac beats, wiry old sourdoughs of the spirit who carry pilgrim staffs, recite sutras, and leap from hummock to hummock as agile as mountain goats.
The town where I keep an office is north and to my right. By contrast with the swamp, the town has become a refuge for all manner of conservative folk, graduates of Bob Jones University, retired Air Force colonels, passed-over Navy commanders, ex-Washington, D.C., policemen, patriotic chiropractors, two officials of the National Rifle Association, and six conservative proctologists.
Paradise Estates, where I live now, is another matter. Directly opposite me, between swamp and town, its houses sparkle like jewelry in the sunlight. Emerald fairways run alongside sleepy bayous. Here everyone gets along well, heathen and Christian, Jew and Gentile, Northerner and Southerner, liberal and conservative. The Northerners, mostly businessmen and engineers from places like Kenosha and Sheboygan and Grosse Pointe, actually outnumber the Southerners. But they, the Northerners, have taken to Southern ways like ducks to water. They drink toddies and mint juleps and hold fish fries with hush puppies. Little black jockeys fish from mirrors in their front yards. Life-sized mammy-dolls preside over their patios. Nearly everyone treats his servants well, picking them up in Happy Hollow and taking them home, allowing “totin’ privileges” and giving them “Christmas gifs.”
The Negroes around here are generally held to be a bad lot. The older Negroes are mostly trifling and no-account, while the young Negroes have turned mean as yard dogs. Nearly all the latter have left town, many to join the Bantus in the swamp. Here the conservatives and liberals of Paradise agree. The conservatives say that Negroes always have been trifling and no-account or else mean as yard dogs. The liberals, arguing with the conservatives at the country club, say yes, Negroes are trifling and no-account or else mean as yard dogs, but why shouldn’t they be, etcetera etcetera. So it goes.
Our servants in Paradise are the exceptions, however: faithful black mammies who take care of our children as if they were their own, dignified gardeners who work and doff their caps in the old style.
Paradise Estates, where I live, is a paradise indeed, an oasis of concord in a troubled land. For our beloved old U.S.A. is in a bad way. Americans have turned against each other; race against race, right against left, believer against heathen, San Francisco against Los Angeles, Chicago against Cicero. Vines sprout in sections of New York where not even Negroes will live. Wolves have been seen in downtown Cleveland, like Rome during the Black Plague. Some Southern states have established diplomatic ties with Rhodesia. Minnesota and Oregon have their own consulates in Sweden (where so many deserters from these states dwell).
The old Republican Party has become the Knothead Party, so named during the last Republican convention in Montgomery when a change of name was proposed, the first suggestion being the Christian Conservative Constitutional Party, and campaign buttons were even printed with the letters CCCP before an Eastern-liberal commentator noted the similarity to the initials printed on the backs of the Soviet cosmonauts and called it the most knotheaded political bungle of the century — which the conservatives, in the best tradition, turned to their own advantage, printing a million more buttons reading “Knotheads for America” and banners proclaiming “No Man Can Be Too Knotheaded in the Service of His Country.”
The old Democrats gave way to the new Left Party. They too were stuck with a nickname not of their own devising and the nickname stuck: in this case a derisive acronym that the Right made up and the Left accepted, accepted in that same curious American tradition by which we allow our enemies to name us, give currency to their curses, perhaps from the need to concede the headstart they want and still beat them, perhaps also from the secret inkling that our enemies know the worst of us best and it’s best for them to say it. LEFT usually it is, often LEFTPAPA, sometimes LEFTPAPASAN (with a little Jap bow), hardly ever the original LEFTPAPASANE, which stood far what, according to the Right, the Left believed in: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, The Pill, Atheism, Pot, Anti-Pollution, Sex, Abortion Now, Euthanasia.
The center did not hold.
However, the Gross National Product continues to rise.
There are Left states and Knothead states, Left towns and Knothead towns but no center towns (for example, my old hometown over yonder is Knothead, Fedville behind me is Left, and Paradise Estates where I live now does not belong to the center — there is no center — but is that rare thing, a pleasant place where Knothead and Left — but not black — dwell side by side in peace), Left networks and Knothead networks, Left movies and Knothead movies. The most popular Left films are dirty movies from Sweden. All-time Knothead favorites, on the other hand, include The Sound of Music, Flubber, and Ice Capades of 1981, clean movies all.
I’ve stopped going to movies. It is hard to say which is more unendurable, the sentimental blasphemy of Knothead movies like The Sound of Music or sitting in a theater with strangers watching other strangers engage in sexual intercourse and sodomy on the giant 3-D Pan-a-Vision screen.
American literature is not having its finest hour. The Southern gothic novel yielded to the Jewish masturbatory novel, which in turn gave way to the WASP homosexual novel, which has nearly run its course. The Catholic literary renascence, long awaited, failed to materialize. But old favorites endure, like venerable Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann, who continue to write the dirty clean books so beloved by the American housewife. Gore Vidal is the grand old man of American letters.